Some of the best small business marketing tools are free, or at least very affordable. And no one's better at digging up the very best Web tools to help your marketing efforts than Andrew Lock. Today's crop includes an SEO site, a small business software package to add pizazz to your sales letters and a site where you can distribute your videos.

SEOBook

The motto at SEOBook, a search engine optimization site, is “Learn, Rank and Dominate.”

What is SEOBook? It’s a training course and tools. It offers a training program with more than 100 training modules on things like keyword research, link building, site architecture, website monetization, pay-per-click ads, tracking results and a whole bunch more.

It also offers SEO tools that allow you to create metatags, perform keyword research, spy on your competitors with competitive research tools, as well as perform link analysis. In the Tools category, there's an SEO toolbar, which includes things like a keyword tool which suggests keywords to you.

The site also has a competitive research tool called SEO for Firefox, Google Gadgets and Rank Checker to find out where your site ranks with the search engines. Some of the other resources include a blog and some forums.

You need to be a member to access the training materials, which include PPC advertising, tracking results, website credibility and website monetization. They talk about Google AdWords, SEO providers, low-end SEO providers – meaning they have a variety of different tracks based on your interests: if you just want to increase your own search engine optimization or if you want to offer SEO as a service for other folks.

The advantage to joining, they say, is that you can dramatically increase your website traffic, and you can ask SEO questions whenever you want. The risk is that there’s a $300 a month up-front cost. Well, that’s being up front.

That’s $3,600 a year if you join at SEOBook.com, but it has a fair amount of free resources available for those of us who are just plain cheap.

CopyBoosters

Most sales letters -- whether online or in print -- are boring. There’s a big block of text that looks daunting to read and, unsurprisingly, most people either click away if they’re on a website, or they just throw the letter away without reading it.

But it doesn’t have to be like that -- oh, no! Simply formatting and the use of color, borders, bullets and things like that make a sales letter much more appealing. But there’s something else you can do to take the effectiveness to an even higher level. Can you guess what it is? Well, I’ll tell you.

Adding handwritten text -- scribbles, arrows, doodles and so on -- are proven to make any sales letter much more effective, and the same applies online too. The problem, of course, is how can you add these types of handwritten doodles?

Well, the solution is a package called Copy Doodles. It’s a collection of premade graphics that look like handwriting -- because they were originally handwriting. They’re available from TheCopyBoosters. You get hundreds of them, in multiple colors to suit the piece, and they’ll pay for themselves the first time you use them.

If you do any kind of sales letters, online or offline, my advice is to grab the package. It’s a really great package.

TubeMogul

Once you’ve created persuasive videos to help sell your products, what do you do with them? You take them to TubeMogul where, quite simply, it’ll distribute your video to sites like YouTube, Google Video, AOL Video, MetaCafe and many more.

It’s all done automatically, and you even get to see stats of how many people view your videos on each of the sites. Tube Mogul is very easy to use and best of all it’s completely free.

Now, for those of you who want to distribute your videos to even more sites as well as have them converted to podcasts, the best tool is called Traffic Geyser. It’s not cheap, but it’s the ultimate way to get your videos out there. I’ve managed to get top 10 rankings in Google within 48 hours using this tool, so I definitely recommend it.

Andrew Lock is a self-described maverick marketer and the creator and host of Help! My Business Sucks, a free, weekly Web TV show full of practical marketing tips, advice and resources to help small businesses "get more done and have more fun."

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